Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is transforming the grocery industry, aiming to provide essential services for customers while offering flexible earning opportunities for Personal Shoppers. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Home & Cross-Retailer Search team, you will build the infrastructure that determines what customers see and buy, focusing on retrieval, distributed systems, and machine learning.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale
- Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume grows
- Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signals
- Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline eval
- Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar: reduce time-to-production, build reusable components, and make it easy for product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction
- Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices
- Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownership
- Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffs
- Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams
Skills
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
- Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering results
- Deep expertise in backend systems: high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage systems
- Experience building or scaling search, recommendations, or feed-ranking systems at significant traffic volume
- Strong command of system design principles: reliability, fault tolerance, observability, graceful degradation
- Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages; comfort across the stack to debug and contribute where needed
- Strong communication skills - able to write crisp technical documents and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
- BS/MS in Computer Science, a related field
- Experience at a marketplace or e-commerce platform with complex catalog, inventory, or fulfillment constraints
- Familiarity with ML serving infrastructure, feature stores, and online/offline evaluation frameworks
- Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming) and search indexing at scale (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch)
- Track record of improving developer productivity and platform health: reducing p99 latency, improving cost efficiency and cutting incident rates
- Prior work on personalization systems using collaborative filtering, contextual bandits, or session-based signals
Benefits
- Instacart is a Flex First team
- Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events.
- This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
- Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
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